Mine Are the Words
by vifetoile89
Summary: Foxface, real name Renata, carried poetry into the arena as her weapons, the words of illegal books. These are her words in three stages.
1. Her Interview with footnotes

**Mine are the Words**

By Vifetoile

Disclaimer: Probably everyone has put their own spin on Foxface, but here is mine. What can we say, she's one of the biggest enigmas of the series. This story will involve shameless quoting of books that I love. I don't own any of them, nor do I own the Hunger Games. Also, a large part may have simply been inspired by the fact that Foxface's name in the French translation is "La Reynarde" – literally, the female counterpart of Reynard, the dashing fox hero who always outwits his rivals.

ooooo

Stage One: Her Interview (with footnotes)

Caesar Flickerman, all big smile and coordinated colors, watched the girl from District 5 approach. She wore black and white, to let the bright red color of her hair shine. Her smile was quirked to the right, and her amber eyes studied him calmly.

"So," he said, "District Five, Renata Scrivener." (1)

"That's me," (2) she answered, making a tiny bow.

"You've been looking wide-eyed all around you ever since you got here, taking in everything. A little living camera!" he points to her, looks at the audience, as if to say _The darnedest thing!_ "What impresses you the most about the Capitol since you got here?"

She takes a minute to consider,(3) curling her left fist under her chin like a little fox's paw. "The tattoos," she answers. "My stylist has got these amazing tattoos all over her arms and her face. If I win, I'll get tattoos like that." (4)

"Fabulous! I'd love to get some tats myself, but, y'know, the audience relies on this face year after year," Caesar shrugged.

"Hey, some things are too good to change," Renata answers.

The audience gives a big laugh at that. Caesar does, too.

"You saucy thing! So what do you like to do back home?"

"Oh…" she answers languidly. "Studying… (5) playing games… (6) helping out my auntie." (7) She waves to the camera. "Hi, Auntie!" (8)

"Almost out of time, now. Before we go, why don't you tell me about that hand there?"

Renata holds up her left hand. Her index finger and middle finger are missing the first two joints. "I cut off the tops of these fingers by accident with a paper slicer when I was seven. I bled _so much_… but I didn't scream once." (9)

"Wow! There you have it! I think this redhead has more than a few surprises in store for us. Go on, have a seat. Next up…"

ooo

(1) District Five names tend to be old, passed down in families. Renata is named for her mother, her great-grandmother, a great-great aunt, and so on.

(2) Renata likes her name. She knows all the tales of Reynard the Fox, and likes to think he was her _real_ namesake. She never learns her nickname is "Foxface," but she would approve heartily. She also has the same name as a character in the novel _Reaper Man_, which she has read but doesn't really understand yet.

(3) She's torn between the profusion of food, the libraries everyone seems to carry around on their cellular phones, or the absolute _idiocy_ run rampant.

(4) The tattoos will be calligraphy.

(5) Renata gets very good grades, which rather unnerves her teachers. It's one thing for a girl to be insolent, sly, and talk back, but being _smart_ too? It's just too much.

(6) She loves chess. Is bad at Rock-Paper-Scissors.

(7) Renata's mother died giving birth to her. Her father raised her with his sister, before his death. She and Auntie Gwen are all they've got.

(8) Auntie Gwen has raised Renata to be her successor in the black-market vocation she has. Auntie Gwen copies out books.

And Renata loves books. She loves being surrounded by them, reading them, sending them out all over Panem to where someone will see them and learn, and she especially loves getting new books. She can stay up all night, lose a weekend, to sitting at an antique typewriter and copying out the words of another, line after line, page after page. To be reading and writing at once… so what if she has carpal tunnel at age 14… It's worth it to know she's spreading books like candles, like fire, keeping up a never-ending flame.

(9) This is true.


	2. Her Quotes

Stage Two: Her Quotes

On the second day of the Games, Renata surveyed the arena floor from the tree she had made her bed. Her stomach grumbled, but she'd gone long stretches of time without eating, being too absorbed in a book to care. She would be fine.

The loneliness nagged her, though. The silence.

She said, softly, as the sun came up and hit her red hair,

"Into this wild abyss, the womb of nature and perhaps her grave,

Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,

But all these in their pregnant causes mixed

Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,

Unless the almighty maker them ordain

His dark materials to create more worlds,

Into this wild abyss the wary fiend

Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while,

Pondering her voyage . . ." (1)

She'd seen books burned in the town square, heard of houses burned to cinders. Her teacher was once whipped in public because he'd said "'Tis better to reign in hell than serve in heaven" in front of a Peacekeeper. If the Capitol realized what she said, her auntie could be targeted. But she needed the words, the way that they took the loneliness and fear and chaos around her and framed it into something beautiful and clear, something she can understand and manipulate. She needed the words more than ever.

ooo

Days later. She was stalking the woods, looking for food, when she heard singing – an untrained voice, a little hoarse, but clear – and sad.

"Here it's safe, and here it's warm, here the daisies'll guard you from every harm," floated on the air to a tune as rhythmic as a cradle rocking.

Renata wanted to find that voice, write down the words, so she crept forward, stopping when she heard the cannon blast. She was just in time to see the District 12 girl weave flowers into the hair of the little black girl from District 11.

Renata wanted to spring forward and offer an alliance, however brief, but she saw the bow and quivers. The District 12 girl was like Artemis, the Greek goddess of all wild and innocent things, who killed a man for having seen her naked. This girl – the girl who was on fire – would despise Renata for seeing her at her most vulnerable, with salt water bathing her dirty face.

It wasn't until Renata was far away that she remembered that the entire nation witnessed that death, and that the District 12 girl knew that. Being so hungry, she forgot things from time to time. But it was too late. The moment that they might have allied had passed.

But still, when she saw the face of Rue projected in the sky, she asked, as the anthem played, "Lord, what can the harvest hope for, but the care of the Reaper Man?" (2)

ooo

Between her moments of triumph, when she avoided the bombs around the Career's food, and her successful flights and thefts, sometimes she tumbled into despair. When cold rain pelted her, she kept herself warm by reciting poems, all the poems she could remember, against the noise of rainfall. But the ones that come easiest to her were the poems of hopelessness, and anger, and fear, and, of course, hunger.

ooo

The day before Renata's death, she was giddy as could be. Heedless of the dangers outside of the arena, she proudly recited,

"The morning comes, the night decays, the watchmen leave their stations.  
>Let the slave grinding at the mill run out into the field:<br>Let her look up into the heavens and laugh in the bright air;  
>With the enchainèd soul shut up in darkness and in sighing…<br>They look behind at every step and think it is a dream,  
>Singing, 'The Sun has left his blackness, and has found a fresher morning<br>And the fair Moon rejoices in the clear and cloudless night;  
>For Empire is no more, and now the Lion and Wolf shall cease.'" (3)<p>

She dances, or tries to. She stumbles from one tree to another. She is in the final five. Or perhaps four. Or three. She is so clever. She is bound to win. And then she will be free and gladly chain herself to her books, her books that have saved her. She is so hungry, her head is gone light and the ground sometimes tilts under her.

She will live forever.

1. From _Paradise Lost_, by John Milton, also the epigraph to Philip Pullman's _The Golden Compass_.

2. From _Reaper Man_, by Sir Terry Pratchett. Now, she understands, and wants to get home so she can reread it.

3. Modified, for length, from _America: A Prophecy_, by William Blake, also the epigraph to Philip Pullman's _The Amber Spyglass_. All of these books existed as ghosts of themselves within Panem's bootleg book market.


	3. Her Vision

Stage Three: Her Vision

As Katniss' fire blazed, the tiny candles that Renata sent out caught tinder and illuminated.

Auntie Gwendolyn, after Renata's death, took up a calligraphy pen and in every book remaining that her niece had transcribed, she wrote: _Ex Libris Renata Scrivener_

It's the only memorial her red-haired adoptive daughter will ever receive. Gwen keeps the books safe through the revolution. But those who ever received a Scrivener book also wrote her name in the first leaf, irregardless of whether she copied it out. Some even wrote out the strange things she quoted during her Games. These books also survive the revolution. And like everything else in Panem, they have their price. Soon Renata Scrivener books are appearing in auction houses, fetching higher and higher prices.

It's only later, after money is exchanged, that people go home and open the pages…

A decade of peace passes. The television broadcasts are still going, but losing a little steam. News and public service announcements are all well and good, but they're becoming a little repetitive.

Then, a few people in what was once District Five decide to put on a play.

It's an authentic Renata Scrivener, donated from Gwendolyn herself. It's about violence and love and war and death that somehow transcends death, and it has a few good comic moments, and since that's everything that Panem knows, it's a good place to start.

_Juliet_'s actress is a girl with olive skin, grey eyes, and a black wig in a long braid. Shy and earnest _Romeo_ is taller, burlier, with curling blonde hair. The costumes are all over the place, because no one really knows what someone from "Verona" should dress like.

Someone a little sharper could notice that _the Nurse_ acts quite a bit like the infamous Haymitch Abernathy, and that the teasing _Mercutio_ has the same mannerisms as Finnick Odair once had. _The Prince_ in black and white is played by a woman, a small woman with a commanding, melodious voice and bright red hair.

Then, to finish, to remind them of what was lost, the almost-lost footage of the 74th Hunger Games is played, showing the foxlike girl chanting "The morning comes, the night decays," with a prophetic light in her eyes.

The broadcast is an enormous success. Soon the television network coordinators are overwhelmed with requests to broadcast their amateur productions of the plays and novels and even poems that they've found. Better yet, some people are writing out stories of their own.

Watching _Romeo and Juliet_ at home, Gwendolyn Scrivener smiles. Renata, she knows, would have much rather been Mercutio.

A week after the first broadcast of _The Merchant of Venice_, acted with more enthusiasm than refinement by the oceanside citizens, Gwendolyn packs up a few of the books that Renata copied out and mails them out.

Nine days after that, Katniss Everdeen heads out to hunt, only to find a large box on her doorstep.

She hunts no more that day, but sits in a sunbeam, reading slowly, and in every book she finds the girl she called Foxface, reaching out to Katniss at long last across time and space. Renata will live forever.


End file.
